‘Is it? Haven’t you left out one or two details?’
Stevenson looked at his interrogator. ‘Well . . .’ He hesitated. ‘Probably, but nothing important that I can think of.’
‘Nothing like torching the shed later, after you’d rescued the dog, by way of revenge? Nothing, perhaps, like being caught in the act by Murdoch and deciding to have it out with him, once and for all? You were angry, weren’t you – very angry? That dog’s more like a child to you than an animal, and what Murdoch was doing was murder in your eyes. Oh, maybe you didn’t set out to kill him, but when you lost your temper, like that day at the sheepdog trials—’
It was a very aggressive performance, and Kingsley had raised his voice. The door to the back of the house burst open and Susie Stevenson erupted into the room.
‘You’re a fool, Findlay!’ she cried. ‘I told you I should stay. They’re trying to stitch you up for murder now. They do that all the time – get you confused, so you say the wrong thing, and then when you correct it they claim you’ve been lying. You’ve seen it often enough on TV. But I heard every word. That’s a false accusation, and I’m going to phone a lawyer.’
Kerr got up and came over to her. ‘Mrs Stevenson, you can of course have anyone you like present. All we are doing at the moment is talking to your husband, trying to establish a background for the case. If we were going to use anything he said as evidence, we would have to caution him first.’
Sensing the woman hesitate, Kerr went on, ‘Perhaps you can help us. You’ll know when your husband left and when he came back with the dog. Perhaps if we knew the times involved we could work out whether he could have had time to do what my colleague suggested.’ She knew the answer would be worthless – she could see Susie’s eyes already narrowed in calculation of the shortest believable interval – but it had calmed her down, as Kerr had intended it should.
‘Let me see,’ Susie was saying. ‘It must have been after seven-thirty when you left. I know because Josh had just gone to bed. And you were back by half-past eight – I looked at my watch. So you would only have had time to pick up the dog and come straight back.’
Kerr would have known it was a lie – she doubted if it was physically possible, given the narrow, awkward Drumbreck road – even if she hadn’t seen Findlay open his mouth as if to speak, think the better of it and close it again.
‘And then, of course, we were here together the whole of the rest of the night,’ Susie finished triumphantly. ‘So quite obviously, he could have had nothing to do with anything else that might have taken place.’
Kingsley had said nothing since Suzy entered the room, only observing them both with a cold, unwavering stare. Now he said, ‘Did either of you know Davina Watt?’
That hit a nerve. To Kerr’s astonishment, Findlay’s pale, freckled skin went fiery red and Susie’s mouth pleated itself into a tight, hard line.
‘I – I used to,’ Stevenson stammered. ‘Years ago. Before we were married.’
‘You, Mrs Stevenson?’ Kingsley seemed only mildly interested.
‘She was – around,’ Susie managed.
‘How well did you know her?’
Before Findlay could speak, Susie said quickly, ‘Oh, she worked in the solicitors’ office that Fin used for our farm, which wasn’t far from Wigtown. We met her socially a few times.’
‘Mrs Stevenson, meeting her socially wouldn’t make your husband go bright red and you look as if you were sucking a lemon.’ Kingsley sounded amused. ‘We can go around asking people for gossip, or you can tell us yourselves now.’
Susie’s face darkened. ‘There’s absolutely nothing to tell—’ but Findlay took over.
‘I made a fool of myself. I wasn’t the first, and I don’t suppose I was the last either to lose my head over Davina. Susie and I were engaged and I broke it off. It was a complete nonsense, and I realized what an idiot I had been. Susie forgave me. That’s all.’
‘That was my first mistake!’ Susie shot at him bitterly. ‘It’s been one mess after another, and now this – thanks to your obsession with that stupid dog.’ She turned away and stood with her back to them, arms folded, staring blindly out of the window.
‘I see,’ Kingsley said softly. ‘Could it be that you only realized you’d made a mistake when she dumped you and moved on?’
He’d scored a hit with that one too. Findlay winced, and Kerr heard the hiss of an indrawn breath from his wife.
Kingsley pursued his advantage. ‘And how did you feel when she turned up in the neighbourhood again?’
‘I didn’t even know,’ Stevenson protested, and Susie swung round.
‘Look, the woman left the place long ago. Findlay saw that she’d made a fool of him; why would it matter to either of us what she did after that?’
‘All right, Mrs Stevenson. Now, Niall Murdoch – did you have any dealings with him, Mrs Stevenson?’
‘We knew him slightly, as another farmer.’ She met his eyes squarely. ‘I haven’t seen him for years.’
‘Mmm.’ Kingsley got up abruptly. ‘I think that’s as far as I want to take that angle right at the moment. Findlay Stevenson, you are under arrest. I am charging you with the theft of a valuable animal. I am now cautioning you. You do not have to say anything . . .’
Susie’s outburst was spectacular; she launched herself towards the officers in a fury, but her husband caught her arm and shook it.
‘Calm down, Susie. There’s no point. What happens now?’
Susie flung herself free of her husband’s restraint and collapsed, sobbing dramatically, into a chair. It was agreed that Findlay, with the dog, would follow them to the police HQ in Kirkluce where he would make a formal statement and the dog would be impounded.
Still smarting at the way Kingsley had treated her as his junior while he asked the important questions, Kerr got into the car and slammed the door. ‘Well, that was a good way of handling the boss’s request for tact! Was there any reason why you couldn’t have asked him in for questioning, and charged him there?’
Kingsley was unrepentant. ‘Why should someone get special treatment just because she’s involved? And it broke them wide open, didn’t it?’
She had to give him that; it was the truly maddening thing about Jon Kingsley – that he was good. Kerr changed her tack. ‘Anyway, perhaps I could remind you not to give me orders? You’re not a sergeant yet.’
He grinned. ‘Act it, become it. I’d put money on Greg taking early retirement. He’s pretty fed up with the job, and after his latest fiasco over Ingles . . .’
Kerr noted wryly the transferred ownership. If the fiasco had been a triumph, Allan and Kingsley would have been in it together. And she hadn’t much brief for Allan, but Kingsley as sergeant would be infinitely worse.
Just to be irritating, she said, ‘Don’t count on it. Andy Macdonald’s done his sergeant’s exams already.’ But she had a sinking feeling that if it came to a choice, the smart money would be on Kingsley, given his record.
Still, as they drove down the track to the main road, she added defiantly, ‘Anyway, I don’t care what you cracked open. It doesn’t hang together. Apart from anything else, if Murdoch surprised him as he was torching the shed, how come he was in day clothes and got his head bashed in down by the boat? I still don’t see that man as a killer.’
Kingsley’s smile was wolfish. ‘Perhaps not,’ he conceded. ‘But what about her?’
Donald Bailey’s unannounced appearance in her office took Fleming by surprise. He must still be feeling penitent: it was normal practice for him to summon her to his, on the first floor. He must have taken the stairs too, rather than the lift, and he was breathing heavily as he came in.
He collapsed into a chair, which gave an alarming groan. ‘I’m not sure about this keep-fit nonsense – not sure at all,’ he grumbled. ‘Seems to me that all it’s likely to do is to seek out any flaws there may be in the system. But you know how it is with doctors these days – paid by results, so they’re always on at you with scare stories.
‘So, Marjory, how are we getting on?’
Fleming grimaced. ‘The reports are coming in all the time, but nothing seems to hang together. Every time I look at it the picture seems to shift. I can’t even make up my mind whether we’re looking for one killer or two.’
‘Don’t like coincidences. Usually they aren’t.’
‘Tam agrees with you. And certainly, we’ve nothing to suggest Ingles did anything more than he admits to. They’ve found Davina’s hired car but it’s a burned-out shell so they won’t get much from that.’
‘Leave Ingles out of it, then. What have you got?’
‘I wish I knew.’ Fleming sighed. ‘It’s a smoke-and-mirrors job – just when you think you’re on to something, you find you’ve been led into a blind alley. For instance, the hot suspect was a man McLeish, who’s on a charge already for vandalism on the Murdochs’ property. Then he turned out to have been a barman at the Yacht Club too, so would have known Davina, and I thought we were getting somewhere. But half an hour ago I had a phone call from the local sergeant who’d arrested him in the first place, and McLeish has got four mates and a bartender who can say he was drinking with them from six-fifteen onwards and by closing time he wasn’t fit to walk, let alone go off for a spot of fire-raising in Drumbreck. Had to pour him into his bed, by all accounts.’
Bailey considered that. ‘Hmm. Well, you know what I’m going to say, Marjory –’
She did indeed. If she had a fiver for every time he mentioned it, she could retire happy.
‘– Ockham’s razor. Never mind the smoke and the mirrors. What’s the simple solution?’
‘Someone killed Davina, then went on to kill Murdoch.’
‘Go on. Features in common?’
Fleming considered that. ‘The method – a bash on the head. With a stone in one case, possibly even in both, though the pathologist says it wasn’t the same one. We’ll know more after the autopsy, but they’ve got people away on holiday and as he doesn’t think there’ll be any surprises it won’t be done till Monday. They’re doing all the usual tests for fibres and so on, but whatever they find, fibres don’t come with names and addresses attached.
‘Anyway, I suppose you could say the weapons suggest the killer didn’t go prepared, he just reacted. It’s an odd combination if so – the unplanned attack, but no immediate and obvious traces left. Yet it was in Davina’s case a sort of fury, given the beating-up she took.’
‘So – a man, then?’
‘The pathologist said a woman wasn’t impossible, but quite honestly, yes, I’m assuming it’s a man we’re looking for.’
‘There’s Murdoch’s wife, though, remember – you haven’t mentioned her, but close to home is always the place to start.’
‘I’m going out to see her later. The report on her reaction to the news is that it was cold-blooded, to say the least. And perhaps, given his alleged morals, Davina returning was a threat to their marriage or something – though from the sound of it, she’d have been happy enough to be rid of him.’
‘Expensive business, divorce. Much more profitable to be a widow. It’s amazing when you get right down to it, how often money is behind murder.’
‘I’ll keep that in mind, though I think at the moment it only opens up another hall of mirrors.’
‘You keep Ockham’s razor in the forefront of your mind, and you won’t go far wrong.’ Bailey got up. ‘Well, I think you’ve benefited from a few pointers there, Marjory. And I’ll just go and phone the ACC and assure her that we’ve everything in hand and expect a favourable outcome shortly.’
‘One day, Don, a big black thing will come down the chimney and carry you off, if you go on telling porkies like that.’
He smiled benevolently. ‘Oh, but Marjory, I am in momentary expectation of a major breakthrough and a favourable outcome. Very shortly. That’s your job, isn’t it?’
Fleming viewed his retreating back with exasperation. He’d been helpful, supportive – then that final burst of pomposity, and the unnecessary tweak of the tail! Oh well, that was just Donald, and she should be used to it by now.
Still, she’d been ordered to produce a speedy result. And it was twelve o’clock already – where did the time go? She’d better get down to Drumbreck. The incident room would probably be flooded with information this morning and she ought to check out the manpower situation; she’d be interested to see what was coming in, too. She was on her feet when her mobile rang and Laura’s hesitant voice greeted her.
‘Marjory – is this a bad moment?’
‘Not at all, Laura. I’ve just got rid of the Super, and I’m on my way out in a minute.’
‘I hate to interrupt you at work, but I’ve just heard about Angus. How is he – and poor Janet? I met one of her neighbours in the High Street this morning and she was saying things were bad.’
‘Oh, horrible.’ Marjory sat down again. ‘It’s all so bleak . . .’
It was a relief to talk to her friend, even though there was little Laura could say from a professional point of view that was comforting.
‘We’ll just have to take it as it comes,’ Marjory said at last. ‘And of course I’ve got my hands full here.’
‘How is it going? I’ve heard half-a-dozen rumours – it’s the hot topic in the Co-op this morning.’